Filtering by Category: Nordic Food Lab

We were very excited to host our 3rd Monday Aperitivo 29th of January after our previous successful Monday Aperitivo in 2017. A concept where science and culinary techniques meet for a kitchen talk to stimulate appetite! This time, squids from the North took the stage of discussion, reflection and our palates.

By
examining New Nordic Cuisine - a
contemporary food discourse based only on produce grown and ways of cooking
“native” to the Nordic region - this article explores localised cuisine as a focal point for analysing contemporary flows of identity
sentiments in the Nordic region in the 21st century. By
(re)creating a Nordic terroir, New Nordic
Cuisine enables its “natives” to ingest the (cultural) landscape, and
consume a material version of local and regional identity. Identity will be
shown to be a concept that is in many ways inarticulate but can be ingested as
“nature” through localised cuisine, becoming, in the words of Appadurai (1981),
‘a highly condensed social fact’, and established “The Nordic” as a marker of
group identity in the Scandinavian region.

Towards the end of June, work at the lab slowed as we donned our boots and headed out to the rain-soaked fields at Refshaleøen. The circus tent was up and the tasks were set to prepare the site for the second MAD Symposium, a thus-far annual gathering of chefs, producers, thinkers, and leaders in food from around the world. The theme of this year's symposium was 'appetite', and the twenty or so speakers delivered a huge range of talks, from the incredibly polished to the conversational; there was sharing of research, demonstrations of all sorts, musings on the larger, less tangible forces of culture, stories most of us could never begin to think up, and of course, some delicious and intriguing samples. Some of our favourite presentations were those by Roddy Sloan, who supplies Noma with sea urchins from the northern reaches of Norway, and Patrick Johansson from Sweden, also known as the Butter Viking, who makes the most interesting and expert butters. Other notables included David Chang, Wylie Dufresne, Dan Barber, Paul Rozin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and Ferran Adrià. All shared their thoughts with style.

These past few weeks have seen a lot of changes: interns have come and gone (more on their projects soon), MAD Symposium brought all sorts of visitors to the boat (even more than usual), and probably most significantly, we welcomed on Ben Reade as our new Head of Culinary Research and Development. With Lars leaving his official position at the lab to go head up the test kitchen at Noma, Ben immediately seemed like the perfect new fit for the job.

Mark Emil Hermansen is our new man on boat. Here he is caught fishing for amphipod crustaceans (seaweed fleas) on a misty day in a corner of the Copenhagen harbor. With his entrepreneurial spirit and a background in the social sciences and humanities, he will join our effort to link present and past food discourses, to explore and shape the food of the future.

Nordic Food lab featured in a large article on the interaction between science and gastronomy. It's in Die Zeit's science section. Interested readers with german skills can read it here: Auf dem Geschmack gekommen